09/08/2026
Amazed, and Still Looking for Home
I am often amazed by people who spent a lifetime as Roman Catholics, finally saw the problems in Rome, and then walked into a Protestant church as if that were the next faithful step.
I understand the first part of the journey. Many of us who love the ancient Western liturgy felt the same shock: papal claims that the undivided Church never taught, the Filioque added to the Creed, later medieval developments that changed the shape of the faith. The break of 1054 was not a small family quarrel. Rome departed from the consensus of the Fathers and the other patriarchates.
What I cannot understand is the second step. Protestantism did not recover the Church of the first millennium. It was born from the same Western stream that had already left that Church. It then went further.
The Reformers removed books that the Church had read, preached, and prayed for fifteen hundred years. The Apostles and the Fathers used the Septuagint. Those books were not a late Catholic invention. They were part of the Bible the early Church actually used. To drop them is not “getting back to the Bible.” It is cutting the Bible the Church received.
Worse, many Protestant services removed the Lord Himself from the center of worship. Christ said, “This is My Body… this is My Blood.” He said, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you” (John 6:53). St. Paul warned that those who receive unworthily are “guilty of the body and blood of the Lord” (1 Corinthians 11:27). That is not the language of a mere memorial.
The Fathers speak with one voice.
St. Ignatius of Antioch, writing about A.D. 107, said the Docetists “abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ.”
St. Justin Martyr (c. 150): “Not as common bread and common drink do we receive these… the food which has been made Eucharist is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh.”
St. Irenaeus: the bread and the mixed cup, receiving the Word of God, become the Eucharist, the Body of Christ.
St. Cyril of Jerusalem taught the newly baptized: what seems bread is not bread, though it tastes like bread, but the Body of Christ.
St. Ambrose of Milan, a Western Father we still hear in the Western Rite, said: “Before it is consecrated it is bread; when the words of Christ have been added, it is the Body of Christ.”
This was the faith of East and West before 1054. The Holy Eucharist is not a symbol we invent. It is the Lord giving us His own life.
When a tradition treats the Eucharist as only a reminder, or reduces it to a rare ordinance, or removes the altar, the priest, and the mystery of change, it has moved far from what Christ and the Fathers actually taught. That is why the Orthodox Church has always regarded such a departure as heresy: not because we enjoy the word, but because the Church cannot bless a gospel that no longer places the living Christ on the altar.
I write this as a Western Rite Orthodox Christian. We did not invent a new liturgy. We recovered the ancient Western forms, purified of later errors, and kept the same faith the undivided Church confessed: the real, true, life-giving Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist.
If you left Rome because you wanted the faith of the Fathers, do not stop halfway. The Church that never removed those books, never emptied the chalice of its meaning, and never surrendered the Eucharist to private opinion is still here.
Come and see.
